Why you should care about the Xbox One’s Phantom Dust reboot

At this year’s E3 press conference, Microsoft announced another in what seems to be a line of high-profile reboots, though this one was a little different. Though it was introduced as the next in a line of reboots ala Killer Instinct, this new game was never all that well known to begin with: Phantom Dust. Though it went mostly unnoticed when it first released on the original Xbox, the game had such a distinct vision for arena combat that, well, it warranted resurrection today.

Phantom Dust was an in-house venture from Microsoft, and an explicit bid for success in the Japanese market. Panzer Dragoon‘s Yukio Futatsugi headed the project, and hopes were high that it could be a hit in the land of the rising sun. Instead, the game was released to confused and middling reviews; the controls were somewhat awkward, the story utterly incomprehensible, and the single-player campaign kept the game’s fully functioning combat system locked behind over a dozen hours of play.

Still, when it was firing on all cylinders, Phantom Dust was like nothing else out there. It focused on one-versus-0ne combat with a heavy strategy, basically projecting a card-based strategy game into the shoes of a real-time brawler. An incredible variety of powers allowed true customization in gameplay; fighting game fans, who had generally found fully 3D games to be lacking in depth and complexity, found a game worth delving into.

The old Phantom Dust had an odd, distinctive art style on the original Xbox.

This is a part of Microsoft’s wish to undo Sony’s dominance in art and indie games. Whether they were giving big-name funding to games like Flower and Journey or helping bring a wide variety of interesting puzzle and platform games to market, Sony has spent a console generation betting strongly on smaller, more artistic games. Microsoft hopes to recapture the hearts of the hardcore by resurrecting franchises with cred, rather than a high profile. It speaks to a trust in quality over marketing (that’s what it’s supposed to seem to do, anyway).

In addition to a lengthy montage for upcoming indie games on Xbox One, the company used Phantom Dust as an indication that it does indeed love games that cater to the whole gaming market. Killer Instinct got a fairly loving recreation, so if Phantom Dust can get the same level of attention it could finally get the success it deserved the first time.